#9ofspades

[natcat5]

It’s called 麻辣, which means something like “numbing spicy” — the same kind of 麻 that describes the feeling in your leg when it goes to sleep. The little balls are cute but you have to eat carefully to avoid them, which apparently westerners aren’t good at. Anyway, 麻辣 is differentiated from regular 辣 because it’s a different kind of spicy.

Skill issue, I understand 😭

[kadunud]

Umm, thank you? :D My very own pooping horse!

[prokopetz]

I feel like you would appreciate knowing that one of my players when I GM’d Costume Fairy Adventures played as Waluigi and wore the reaper costume the entire time.

Dare I ask what kind of fairy Waluigi was?

[charminglyantiquated]

Hey! Do you know any good tutorials for tying the turk’s head knot on the mariner die? Ideally not a video, as videos are evil. I found a great one for a carrick mat, but that was only 4 bight and I couldn’t figure out how to get an extra loop in.

I got you! Here’s Knots3D’s tutorial, it has a very simple step by step animation of a 5 bight mat which you can pause at any point.

[kaelio]

What do you think of r/wallstreetbets and their effect on the stock market?

uaaahghghghghg

it’s very complicated. there are a lot of things happening and there’s a lot in the known unknown/unknown unknown camps. it’s definitely not as simple as “scrappy old reddit wins the day” though, rest assured this move was absolutely phenomenal for a lot of other, different billionaires who are cleverly staying quiet, in part because the myth that YOU, yes YOU can strike it rich in the stock market with One Easy Trick is part of what makes the market behave the way it does for those who have more wealth than anyone will ever win in this way

oh, also robinhood is an exploitative dangerous platform and not because of all this, for so, so many other reasons. no one without a FINRA license should be able to play with options. that they gamify this is honestly terrifying. remember: if you merely buy and sell equities, the worst you do is end up with a goose egg when it goes bankrupt, which is actually not very common. if you trade options, you can end up with unlimited liability

[pasiphile]

Okay it literally took me THIS long to get the Cunning Linguists pun and I am furious with myself

Hehehehe

[mumblingsage]

Hey, do you have any advice for starting a publishing company, or for publishing things in general?

I started the NSP micropress with Pasi based on my experience self-publishing, which might or might not be a wise thing to do, though I’m pretty pleased with how it worked out. 

For publishing things in general, by which I think you mean getting your own writing published: learn your craft first, and then the technical side of things like formatting a book for print-on-demand (or deciding to go offset with bulk orders from a place like 48hour books) will be pretty simple!

Be okay with getting rejected and don’t take it personally. (Yeah, easy to say, harder to do, but it DOES get easier with time, and in my experience getting my stories rejected a lot as an older teen & younger twentysomething gave me a somewhat thicker skin, at least when it comes to business & professional rejection generally. Tell me my voice sounds annoying and I’ll still cry, though.) 

Learn the lingo: set some time aside each week, or each day, to learn about what people mean by standard manuscript format, dangling modifiers, First Electronic Rights, semi-pro vs professional payment, literary agent query letters, and so on. When I was younger I spent a lot of time on the Absolute Write Water Cooler forum where more experienced writers than I would talk about these things; you pick stuff up. Nowadays a lot of literary discussions happens on Twitter. 

Do not pay a “publisher” to publish you! Learn about vanity presses and how to look out for them. 

The “rules” for best marketing practices change every year. The ones that seem to last are: don’t worry about bad reviews (and definitely don’t argue with them); make it easy and pleasant for fans to interact with you; BookBub is probably the best paid promotion option if you want to spend money on advertising; write more things! This last one is vital; a lot of promotional efforts don’t scale until you have a big enough backlist. I once heard a writer say the only measurable difference he saw in his sales came after he had a short story published in a well-read magazine/webzine. 

For running a small press, I took a lot of those lessons, wrote a call for Submissions (including a pay model that seemed fair to me as a writer while being manageable on a shoestring budget), promoted it places where *I* see calls for submissions as a writer, and now spend a fair amount of time reading submissions :D. And if you’re also a writer, doing this will teach you a LOT about the publishing ecosystem and your “competition”. A lot of larger publications have positions for volunteer submissions reader, if you ever want to try this. For a quick insight, check out the “Slushkiller” blog post from literary agent Theresa Neilsen-Hayden. 

That’s simplifying it, of course (I have a thick Google Drive file called “Erato Planning” with notes for everything from formatting to promotion. If you don’t love organization and planning, parts of the job will be harder). If you have specific questions about parts of the process, feel free to ask!

I will say, while there’s a lot of resources out there for both traditional and self-publishing authors, they’re thinner on the ground for small press runners. For initial NSP setup I owe thanks to some of the people who had published me and were willing to answer questions I had about specific ways of handling back-end and financial aspects. Meanwhile, the best how-to guide I’ve seen so far, in terms of offering a really solid breakdown of numbers (though they won’t apply in every case), is this one by Jamie McGary on “Small Press Publishing for Profit”: https://medium.com/@jamiemcgarry/small-press-publishing-for-profit-part-1-the-breakdown-f847adbd79c8. 

If you search “how to run a small press” you’ll find other blog posts too, often entertainingly titled, with a mix of advice from savvy to borderline unethical. 

Also, the best way to support authors and small presses: buy their books from somewhere other than Amazon (possible exception if they have an Amazon affiliate program; apparently some small presses make up to 20% of their revenue off affiliate fees, which are an advertising payout from Amazon and makes no impact on the price the reader pays). Directly from Smashwords, if they publish there, offers the best royalty rate, if not from their website if they have e-commerce available there. And I’m really excited about Bookshop.org, new this year, which sells paperbacks and distributes profits generously to indie bookstores and to affiliates. Here’s my list for the New Smut Project on Bookshop.org. 

The other big way to support your fave writers & presses is to talk up their books: review, recommend, etc. Word of mouth is the best advertising and an author cannot make it happen, only readers can!

[fierceawakening]

Do you ship Megastar in Tf: Prime? Also, have you read "Antifreeze"?

https://archiveofourown.org/works?utf8=%E2%9C%93&work_search%5Bsort_column%5D=revised_at&include_work_search%5Bfandom_ids%5D%5B%5D=225713&include_work_search%5Brelationship_ids%5D%5B%5D=18245&work_search%5Bother_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bexcluded_tag_names%5D=&work_search%5Bcrossover%5D=&work_search%5Bcomplete%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_from%5D=&work_search%5Bwords_to%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_from%5D=&work_search%5Bdate_to%5D=&work_search%5Bquery%5D=&work_search%5Blanguage_id%5D=&commit=Sort+and+Filter&user_id=Fierceawakening

Maybe. :-)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13009521

This one? I just did. :-)

[ftafp]

Lol at your askbox title. Quick correction on the mythology thing - time wasn’t a son of Pangu (though it was arguably created by Pangu? Retellings often don’t anthropomorphize time, though), and Odin was descended from beings licked out of the ice by Aurgelmir, though some accounts have him be a great-grandson of Ymir.

Nice catch on Odin, I was going off of the great-grandson version but you’re right that was my mistake.

As for Pangu, you’ll have to pay attention to my exact wording on this one

The great giant Pangu was the father of all things. Time betrayed him and killed him to create the world.

I didn’t exactly say that time was literally his child or an anthropomorphized concept, though it’s intentionally written in a way that might imply that in order to draw a parallel.

9ofspades said:

(Cont because tumblr on mobile is incredibly dumb) still a cool coincidence about Odin-Santa, though. Have you seen the meme going around about Woden being Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way?

I’m sorry, WHAT?

[jenroses]

9ofspades replied to your post “People need to stop making lists of people to treat well and just take...”

Exception being Nazis and people who actually want you dead

Okay, but look. Making your default treating people well doesn’t mean that you’re fucked if you’re actually a decent human being to someone who doesn’t deserve it. It doesn’t preclude self defense or speaking out against inequity or malevolent behavior. It just means that you don’t automatically assume that anyone who looks a certain way falls into the “people who want you dead” category. 

You don’t have to be nice to people you know for a fact are out to get you. But if you run around looking for reasons to be shitty to people categorically, you are probably more part of the problem than helping solve it.  And I say that as someone who would have definitely been in the ovens in Nazi Germany for at least three different reasons (I’m Jewish, queer and disabled. I’m also categorically unable to go with the flow for the sake of my own survival.)

There are a number of people in my life who were genuinely awful to me personally, who I have nevertheless been able to function around without compromising my own dignity, up to and including being able to speak to them in civil tone and work together where common interests existed. I would have gained absolutely nothing but my own misery by being nasty to them in the run of everyday life. 

But literally no human being who I do not know and know nothing about would automatically get shitty behavior from me. I will stand up for justice (and do, and have, in public, at microphones, at events sponsored by hateful people) and I will speak truth to power but I don’t go checking people’s religion, ideology or anything else if they’re on the sidewalk hurt and need a hand, or if I’m passing them in a store, or driving down the street near them. 

It costs nothing to be kind. Much of the pain in the world would evaporate if people didn’t keep trying to sort the world into “us” and “them”. Stop looking for the exceptions. This isn’t about exceptions, this is about how you assume you will respond to most people. 

[sugarmagnolia258]

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[incandescent-creativity]

@9ofspades replied to your post “It’s excerpt time again, y’all...”

*thumbs up*

Okay this is just the simplest way to let an author know you liked their stuff and it’s so nice you are so nice thank you thank you thank you

[prokopetz]

So how does Radical Catgirl Anarchy disappear up its own butt?

You are talking about a game where “your anarchist polycule has been infiltrated by Libertarian cyborgs” is a completely plausible output of the scenario generation rules.

[charminglyantiquated]

Hey! I’m not sure if you Star Wars or Trek, but do you think starships in fiction are usually pretty similar to what it’s like being on a ship? Maybe the combat type starships would be more military in nature, but is the vibe otherwise close?

Honestly, unless you’re going the Treasure Planet route of Tall Ships In Space, I think they have very little in common besides perhaps the commonality of a dedicated crew. A larger steel military or shipping vessel might share a similar vibe, but the experience of working on a tall ship specifically is, to me, synonymous with open skies and raw winds and sea spray - just generally being open to the elements for better or for worse in a way your average spacecraft absolutely is not, for all the nice views of the stars it may offer.

Bear in mind I am one of the worst people to ask, however - I have an irrational hatred of space-set fiction. It’s the aesthetic of it - I’ve  definitely enjoyed podcasts set in space! But film, or books that offer any kind of visual description, repel me instantly. The generally accepted cues of space-set fiction - blue and grey metal, harsh lights, right angles, industrial functionality, the exterior darkness of space, the claustrophobia of even the largest ship - always feel so cold to me despite the designer’s best efforts, especially contrasted with what I love about tall ships on a purely visual level - varnished wood, brass and copper and verdigris,  blazing sunlight, fresh air, the curves of the sails, beautiful old tools like compasses and inclinometers. That bias alone makes the experience seem, to me, worlds away from anything set on starships.

[kaelio]

Why didn’t you make it past season 1 of Hannibal?

Wasn’t really my style.

[pasiphile]

铁拳功夫 is a thing even IRL; in Xianxia it’s quite possible to have a form of 铁掌功夫 that makes sword safety a non-issue, and to have that be such a norm that it isn’t even mentioned. Also, I would strongly advise against claiming the ‘terminology’ of the translated version of a book makes the sex scene ‘godawful’ when you aren’t capable of reading the original text with native fluency and have to rely on hearsay to know if it’s due to translation. Tbh in general I wouldn’t criticize a translated

work without first confirming with someone who reads perfectly fluently in the language that the criticisms you’re perceiving in the translation are actually present in the original text.

I definitely buy that there’s questionable or bad stuff happening in this particular work; I’d just ask someone or check out articles or reviews by native writers before saying anything.

You’re absolutely right; as a multilingual person I’ve seen enough examples of how translation can completely fuck up an original, and I really should’ve known better than to judge the original on that.

And it makes much more sense for the whole thing to be a trope of a genre (which i know v v little about) than just a random idea from a writer working under insane deadline pressure - in a way, it’s reassuring, although it brings up a whole load of other intriguing questions about the genre itself.

There’s still the content and the consent issues in those scenes that mean I’m never gonna be a fan, but pointing and laughing at something I don’t know the language nor the context of is bad form and I apologise for it.